Citation analysis as tool for collection use and management at
the library of a research institute
Bart Goossens
Research Institute for Nature and Forest
Gaverstraat 4, 9500 Geraardsbergen, BELGIUM
Bart.Goossens@inbo.be
dr. Marc Pollet
Research Institute for Nature and Forest
Kliniekstraat 25, 1070 Brussels, BELGIUM
Marc.Pollet@inbo.be
Abstract
In April 2006, the Flemish Institutes for Forestry and Game Management and for
Nature Conservation merged into the Research Institute for Nature and Forest
(INBO). Ever since, a new policy and research program has been implemented and
10 new research and 3 support groups where established. And although the electronic
collections of the libraries of both institutes were incorporated into a central
repository, the physical did not yet. A new collection development policy is currently
worked out and will be implemented in 2011. In this proces, bibliographical citation
analysis seems to be promising as tool for collection management decisions.
In a first attempt to validate it’s usefullness, a data set of thirty scientific papers
published by researchers from five different INBO research units during 2007-2010
was analyzed. About 23% of the cited journal issues were available in the INBO
library’s collections, with more than 50% of zone 1 and 2 journals, and 17% of zone 3
journals sensu Bradford. This pattern in zone 1 journals applied to all but one of the
investigated research units. Possible measures to enhance accessibility to full text
scientific papers in the near future are discussed.
Introduction
In April 2006, the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) was established
from the merge of two Flemish governmental organisations, the Institute for Forestry
and Game Management (IBW) and the Institute for Nature Conservation (IN).
Whereas research at IBW and IN was mainly driven by fundamental research, INBO
focuses more strongly on the support of the nature and forest policy and decision
makers in Flanders. In this respect, priorities shifted towards applied, concurrent and
question-drived research, and more fundamental research projects are carried out by
partner scientific institutions including universities, unless they are situated in one of
the longterm research objectives of INBO.
Together with the merge, an internal reorganisation was implemented. Two research
departments (Biodiversity & Natural Environment; Nature management &
Sustainable Use) were erected each comprising five research units, as well as a third
department (Advice & Information - A&I) to provide general support to all INBO
personnel. The A&I department encompasses three different service units providing
assistance with e.g. lab and statistical analyses, ICT and library matters, but is also
responsible for the production of reports and scientific advices. The new
organisational structure and research scope created new challenges to the library’s
operations. It was decided to cope with this in an innovative and efficient way
including periodical review and validations. Improving the library services and
offering a sustainable investment in information technology and education of the
library staff were put forward as primary goals.
One way to evaluate a collection development policy is by citation analysis which has
been studied for over eighty years (Gross and Gross, 1927). It’s based on the method
of counting and ranking the frequency documents are referred to in bibliographies,
footnotes, and/or indexing tools (Baker and Lancaster, 1991). Citation analysis can be
applied to select and deselect materials as it provides insight into the materials that
are selected by various user groups (Dickinson et al., 2009). Citation analysis is not
without problems. Self- and in-house citing is mentioned as one of the most basic
problems of citation analyses, as it appears to be substantial, with approximately 10
to 30% of all citations falling into this category (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1988;
Tagliacozzo, 1977). For the present study, however, we expected these problems to be
rather small. We come to this assumption based on the normative theory, which
states that bibliographies are lists of influences and that authors cite in order to give
credit where credit is due; that is, when an author uses information from another’s
work, he will cite that work (Smith, 1981).
For the first time, a citation analysis was performed at INBO. Our goals were (i) to
investigate what proportion of references cited by INBO researchers is available in
the INBO library, (ii) to investigate if the observed pattern is comparable in the
different research units and what are the factors that affect it, (iii) and to explore if
and in what way the current service can be optimized.
Material and methods
All peer-reviewed papers of INBO researchers published between 2007 and 2010 and
available in ISI SCI were collected using information obtained from the ISI Science
Citation Index (Thomson ISI, 2011). Only papers with an INBO researcher as senior
or first author were included in the analysis. The complete reference, journal title,
number of citations, and relevant information on the first author of each publication
were recorded.
In order to compare patterns between research units based on a sufficiently large
data set, papers were selected from 5 different research groups that published at least
6 papers in the above 4 years period. For each research unit we further selected 6
publications with the highest number of citations. If possible, 6 different authors per
research unit were included.
For the citation analysis, the first author, journal title abbreviation and year of
publication were recorded. We added the publication type (journal vs other) and
citation type (in-house vs external) to the records. Cited journals were matched with
the physical collections of our institute. Digital issues of journals were thus not
included in this study due to the fact that digitization projects at INBO have only
started quite recently. To pool the journal frequency data, we applied Bradford’s Law
(Bradford, 1948). According to this Law, on any subject, a small group of core
journals (zone 1 journals) will provide 1/3 of the articles on that subject, a moderate
number of less-core journals (zone 2 journals) will provide a second 1/3 of the articles
on that subject, and a large number of peripheral journals will provide the final 1/3 of
the articles on that subject. We finally estimated the availability (in our library) of the
core journals of the citations in the 6 papers for each research unit.
Results
The total number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published by INBO researchers
(as first author) between 2007 and 2010 was 68, with a total number of 4,180
citations. Five of the 10 research units published at least 6 papers between 2007 and
2010 (see Table 1). These top-5 research units represent 79,4% of all publications that
were recorded in 2007-2010, with the research unit Species Diversity as the most
productive with 27,9% of all publications.
Table 1. No of publications and citations of the most productive 5 research units
INBO research unit
Species Diversity
Ecosystem Management
Environment and Climate
Ecosystem Diversity
Monitoring Biodiversity Policy
Total no. publications
No. publications
19
13
9
7
6
54
No. citations
1,336
815
444
533
319
3,447
The 30 selected publications (6 for each research unit, see Material and methods)
resulted in a total number of 2,348 references. The research unit Species Diversity
represents 30% of all citations, while the research group Monitoring Biodiversity
Policy accounts for only 13,5% of the citations.
In-house (incl. self-) citation ratios prove to be very low (see Table 2), on average
1.6% of all citations used, and with only a very low variation between the different
research units (1.0% - 2.1%). Our previous assumption that this type of citing would
not strongly affect the results of the present study appears to be correct.
Table 2. Comparison between in-house and total citations
INBO research unit
Species Diversity
Ecosystem Diversity
Ecosystem Management
Monitoring Biodiversity Policy
Environment and Climate
Total
In-house citations
15
5
7
6
5
38
Total citations
707
503
471
319
348
2,348
A total of 1,811 out of 2,348 citations or early 77% of all citations referred to papers
published in journals (Table 3), which is comparable with the commonly used
number of 80 percent for the sciences in general (Bowman, 1990).
Table 3. Comparison of the publication type of citations in 5 research units
INBO Research unit
% books ¥
% journals
Ecosystem Management
4,7
15,4
Ecosystem Diversity
5,7
15,7
Environment and Climate
2,3
12,6
Monitoring Biodiversity Policy
2,3
11,3
Species Diversity
8,1
22,0
Total
23,0
77,0
¥
also including proceedings, reports, annuals, etc …
Total (%)
20,1
21,4
14,8
13,6
30,1
100
The journal citations (1,811 from 574 journals) were further analyzed. According to
our application of Bradford’s Law, 30 journals are considered as core journals, 17 of
which are present in INBO’s library (Fig. 1). Journals of zones 1 and 2 encompass
together 119 of the 574 journals. The remaining almost 80% of the journals were cited
less than 3 times, and 57% of the journals were cited only once.
Figure 1 shows the results of the match between the cited journals and the library
collections, divided in zones 1 to 3 according to Bradford’s Law. The Figure reveals
that over 83% of the zone 3 journals is not available in the library’s collections,
whereas this percentage is much higher for zone 1 and 2 journals, 56.7% and 53.9%
resp.
1 00%
90%
80%
7 0%
60%
lacking
50%
present
40%
30%
20%
1 0%
0%
zone 1
zone 2
zone 3
journal zones sensu Bradford
Figure 1. Comparison of presence or absence of journals in INBO’s library collections,
according to Bradford’s zones.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of the zone 1 journals over the 5 selected research
units. Strikingly, the research unit Ecosystem Management can rely on a full
availability of core journals in the organisation’s library despite the fact that overall
no less than 134 different journals were cited (as compared to e.g. 103 and 99
journals in research units Monitoring Biodiversity Policy and Environment and
Climate resp.). In the remaining research units, the percentage of available journals
ranges from 33.3% and 52.9%.
25
No. of zone 1 journals
20
15
la ckin g
pr esen t
10
5
0
Species Div er sit y
Ecosy st em
Div er sit y
Ecosy st em
Ma n a g em en t
Mon it or in g
Biodiv er sit y
Policy
En v ir on m en t a n d
Clim a t e
Figure 2. Comparison of the number of zone 1 journals of citations over 5 research
units, present or lacking in INBO’s library collections
Discussion
Our study revealed that the INBO library holds only 22.6% of the journals that our
researchers referred to in their papers published between 2007 and 2010. More than
50% of the journals assigned to zone 1 and 2 sensu Bradford (1948) proved available,
which was the case in only 16,7% for zone 3 journals. In reality, papers from 444
different journals were not readily accessible in the physical collections of INBO’s
library.
This implies that researchers themselves had no other option than to do an extra
effort to achieve these publications. In some cases, researchers got in touch with
authors of recently published contributions directly or relied on partner institute and
university facilities. In other cases they contacted the INBO library to purchase the
requested papers, which required subsequent interlibrary loans (ILL) or purchases by
commercial providers.
Undoubtedly, this process is very time-consuming for the researchers and possibly
not very efficient. Indeed, it has happened that researchers looked for the same paper
without being aware of each other’s action. To improve the efficiency, the library as
core information center has an important role to play in the near future.
Three major factors should be taken into account: time, budget and space. To tackle
the time factor, a business analysis will be carried out among a representative group
of researchers to visualise the different ways of publication search along the process
of generating a scientific publication.
Available financial means tend to be constant or even decreasing, which have an
obvious effect on the possible measures taken to extend the library collections. One
option might focus on consortium agreements, an other on the purchase of (generally
less expensive) zone 3 journals in particular.
At this moment, the library space is occupied to such an extend that additional
physical collections might cause a storage problem. For this reason, a decision was
made to develop a library policy focused on digital documents.
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